Remove large number of people from course quickly

We have three campus wide courses (all students are part of the courses) which we manually created, so they don't go through the SIS sync. I need to remove all of the students currently in there and put new students in. I know how to add the students via a spreadsheet upload. I was going to use a spreadsheet with the same format to remove the students, but if I put their status as deleted, will it delete their account or just remove them from the course? I don't want to upload the spreadsheet with their status as deleted and learn that I just wiped out their account completely. I think I know the answer, but want to make sure before I do this.